Bear In The Rough: Book 1: Treasure Hunt (BBW Bear Shifter Romance) Read Online Free PDF Page B

Granddad. He suddenly realized that he had spent too much time taking care of me.
     
                  “There’s a great moment in Sinclair Lewis’s novel Babbit where the main character, a pathetic, dull man who’s lived a pathetic, dull life, finally comes to the end of himself and has this pivotal realization. He says, ‘I’ve never done a single thing I’ve wanted to do in my whole life!’ Granddad had so many plans, but they all fell by the wayside when my parents died and he had to take me in. There’s nothing like suddenly having a child to derail someone’s life. And after I graduated, and after Nanna’s death, he got to thinking and realized that he wanted to do some of those things he had never gotten to do before. And then when he found out he was dying of cancer, he realized if he didn’t do them now, he wasn’t going to. I mean, maybe you could travel the world as a ghost, but he wasn’t counting on it.
     
    “So if he was going to see the world, this was his last chance. Granddad had had this crazy dream his whole life. Growing up I remember him talking about it constantly. He wanted to find out what had happened to our ancestors, our forebears.”
     
                  Olivia looked perplexed. “You mean other than dying?”
     
                  I pursed my lips, choosing my words carefully. “Our family hails from a large… clan, I guess you could call it, and many of them lived together and traveled the world together. They were semi-nomadic. They would vanish for long periods of time and no one would know where they had gone, but then they would turn up again in another part of the world.”
     
                  Olivia nodded thoughtfully.
     
                  “But during the second world war, they vanished and never returned. Of course this was during a time of mass deportations and wholesale slaughter, so it wasn’t that exceptional and very few people noticed. That was during the days when thousands of people could walk into a forest and not come out alive, and it wouldn’t be reported until after the war. My grandfather was just old enough to have served in the war, but had never visited his extended family. After he was discharged from the service he went looking for them and realized that no one knew where they’d gone. Last thing anyone heard, they had been evacuated to Oak Island to escape the Japanese conquest of the Pacific. So he made inquiries at all the hotels, shops and post offices nearby, but though several people responded that they had seen his family here, at some point they were no longer here. And this is where it gets weird: they didn’t leave. They were just… gone. One day they were together, eating breakfast, and the next day their encampment was completely deserted. How do you explain that? How do 500 people on a small island in the middle of nowhere just disappear?”
     
                  “It’s like Roanoke Island,” said Liv, referring to a colonial American colony that vanished, seemingly into thin air.
     
                  “It’s just as mysterious, but less famous,” I said. “I guess because of the times they were living in. But all my life Granddad had had a crazy notion that he would be the one to find them, and no one could talk him out of it. You know how when someone gets an idea in their head like that, when they start to think they’re the chosen one, it becomes a kind of mania, an obsession. He was normal in most respects, but not when it came to this. He felt he had a mystical connection, a blood-link that would help him succeed where every previous explorer had failed. He would be the one to find them.
     
                  “I remember the last night we spent together. He brought out a bottle of champagne and kept me up telling old stories about the war, how he met Nanna in Italy. I woke up late the next morning and he was gone. There was a note